Understanding the Global Neoliberal Agenda Through the United States' Involvement in Libya

• In Event: 61.028 - Understanding and Resisting the Neoliberal Takeover of Schools and Society: A Theoretical, Pedagogical, and Historical Intervention

Abstract

On April 15, 1986, 66 U.S. warplanes began a deadly bombing campaign against the independent and sovereign state of Libya, killing at least 100 civilians, including Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s adopted daughter, Hana. It was the second attack against the nation in as many months: on March 24, U.S. warships and aircraft carriers entered Libyan air and water territories and attacked Libyan patrol boats and ground targets. Three years earlier, in April of 1983, A Nation at Risk was published by Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education. This report embedded the goals and purposes of education within a nationalist framework of economic and technological productivity, called for “rigorous” standards and accountability mechanisms and technologies, and placed teachers in the crosshairs of reform efforts, among other things.
Although separated by time and space, I believe that it is absolutely crucial to understand these two events—the attack on Libya and the publication of A Nation at Risk—as part of the same burgeoning global neoliberal agenda, which is to say that both of these assaults shared the same broad underlying logic and overarching goals. Indeed, they both were produced by—and productive of—a protracted war in which we are still engrossed. In this presentation, I work draw out some of the explicit lines that link the U.S. war on education to the U.S. war on Libya (and its educational infrastructure). The work done in this presentation—the research surveyed, the connections established, and the theoretical and political formulations evoked—is necessary, practical, and urgent. It is directed mostly toward educational scholar-activists in the U.S. as a proposal for the orientation that we employ as we combat the neoliberal privatization of education on varying scales. There is a growing and promising movement across varying sectors of society in the U.S. against these processes and practices, as a result of developments ranging from the imposition of top-down reforms and stifling standardizations to high-stakes testing and attacks on teachers and their unions. Yet this movement has thus far tended to be relatively silent on international issues. One of the primary values of the internationalist analysis that follows is that it links up struggles against the current attacks on public education in the U.S. to resistance struggles against imperialism abroad. Identifying and establishing these potential networks and alliances, I believe, will be crucial to strengthening global resistance to global capital in the neoliberal era. This is done through a synthesis of educational literature on neoliberalism (e.g., Author 2010; Peters, 1996) and political science literature on Libya (e.g., Forte, 2012) through recent events as represented in news articles.

Author

• Derek Ford